It’s 221 BCE. The philosophy of Legalism has triumphed! The whole area that was once controlled by the House of Zhou is now under the control of a single administration, propelled to its position of supremacy by the Legalist philosophy of Shang Yang and Han Fei, implemented by Li Si, Chancellor of King Zheng of Qin, who now describes himself as Qin Shi Huang Di – the First of the August Emperors of Qin. Or was it as simple as that?
There is no doubt that the Qin Empire established total control of the Chinese territories, and was to secure that Imperial territory in a very short space of time indeed. The Legalist theory which had so successfully brought Qin Shi Huang Di to power was immediately extended from the government of the state of Qin to the administration of the whole Empire. The emperor was at the head of the administration, controlling a hierarchical system the next tier of which consisted of the Imperial chancellor and the Imperial counsellor. Below them was a complement of nine ministers of state, each with his own particular field of influence, including one whose responsibilities related to services and sacrifices to divine beings – not perhaps a particularly Legalist portfolio, but we shall return to that later. Below these top levels of the hierarchy, the officials at commandery and county level had their places. This structure worked through a counterflow of top-down edicts and bottom-up ‘memorials’ or petitions, which carried commands and requests respectively.
However perfect the framework, it could not of itself form a fully functioning government, and Qin Shi Huang Di provided the Regulations which were necessary to make it tick. To fund Imperial activities, a universal system of taxation was introduced, based as we have seen in the case of the Qin state on the household unit, and payable in kind14 or in cash. Further demands could also be made on the populace in the form of compulsory labour service for the state, which was served in a variety of ways. Control of the populace at a local level was effected by an expansion of the Qin idea of ‘responsibility units’ to the whole Empire and at an Imperial level by the extension of the institution of the ranks of honour. But the Regulations went into much more of the detail of everyday life than this, as can be read in a set of the Imperial Regulations dated 217 BCE and discovered in a cache of 1,100 inscribed bamboo slips found in a tomb near the city of Wuhan.
The earliest Imperial edict to have survived so far actually dates from 221 BCE and not surprisingly, in view of its dating at the very beginning of Qin Shi Huang Di’s reign, it is concerned with the basic nature of the Empire, setting out the way in which documents of state were to be formulated and specifying how memorials should be addressed to the emperor. This confirms that at the very start of the Imperial period in China, the aim of those administering the Empire was to create a well-organised bureaucracy. This was possible because there was, courtesy of the Confucian tradition, a well-established class of literate officials who would have been available to staff the bureaucratic offices of state. The nature of the edict also confirms the importance of precision to the Legalist mind, reflecting the emphasis that had been placed on the conforming of names to the realities which they defined.
The other notable aspect of the early Qin Imperial bureaucracy, as we can tell from the Wuhan slips, is that it covered pretty well everything to do with the conduct of life at all levels in society. Agricultural practice was specified, including stabling of animals and provision of granaries for crop storage. The format of the coinage was fixed. Financial practice for such matters as government inventories and accounting was laid out in detail. There were regulations for the employment of government officials, the conscription of workers for the state and the treatment of convicted criminals. Weights and measures were standardised, and government-approved standards were set for the purposes of checking and comparison, carrying inscriptions identifying their official origin. The gauge of carts was fixed, so that on rutted roads the wheels would be able to follow in the ruts left by the passage of earlier carts.
The detail of the regulations went down to a very fine level; the format of reports of damage to government property was specified in minute detail, and specifications were laid down on how objects marked with details of ownership were to be dealt with when discarded and the specific ownership changed. A range of punishments applicable for various crimes was prescribed, from the trivial up to torture and execution by the cruellest of methods, as were the procedures for the initiation and conduct of trials at various levels. Under the Qin Empire, standardisation of the written script was also a priority, to iron out differences which had accumulated between the characters used in the different states. The form adopted was distinctive in that it was specifically geared to the use of a writing brush, which had grown in use over the previous two or three centuries, rather than conforming to the patterns created by the sharp implements used for incised writing such as that found on oracle bones or bronze vessels.
This attention to the minutiae of government regulation ensured that so long as the regulations were observed and policed, the state could run smoothly with minimum intervention from the emperor. With secure control of the populace, the Qin Imperial government was able to embark on major civil engineering projects. Roads were constructed to ensure rapid passage for Imperial edicts to the farthest reaches of the Empire. Canal-building provided further transport routes and irrigation schemes. A huge mausoleum project was set in hand to provide a fitting last resting place for Qin Shi Huang Di when the time came. A major military construction project was also undertaken to link together existing lengths of defensive walls begun during the Warring States period to create a single wall protecting the northern and north-western flanks of the Qin territory. This concept of a boundary wall against the ‘northern barbarians’ was to be maintained more or less unchanged until a ‘northern barbarian’ race, the Manchus, seized control of China in the seventeenth century CE.
By means of these Regulations, set up under the auspices of Li Si, and with an energetic emperor in executive control at the top of the hierarchy, strong, centralised power was exerted across the Empire, and the superiority of Legalism would seem to have been established beyond any doubt. However, even under Qin Shi Huang Di, concessions to earlier traditions seem to have been present. We have already seen that one of the ministers of state held a portfolio which was concerned with sacrifices. This is perhaps the first pointer, right at the dawn of Imperial government, to a phenomenon which was to recur throughout Chinese history, namely the tendency of an incoming regime, while overtly reviling its predecessor as an evil power that deserved to be overthrown, to absorb its predecessor’s civil service and adopt many of the prevailing cultural traits. In the Qin Empire this tendency may also be observed in the many formal Imperial Progresses performed by Qin Shi Huang Di to the sacred mountains of China – sacred, that is, in terms of the earlier traditions – and his commissioning of stone inscriptions to record the event.
That is not to say that such acknowledgement of the alternative traditions was universal. In 213 BCE, Li Si began a large-scale destruction of earlier written material which became known as ‘the burning of the books’. We now know that this was not a total destruction of all writings. Technical works dealing with practical matters like agriculture or medicine were not attacked, but anything that might substantiate allegations that the Qin ruler had abandoned the earlier traditions was condemned, and possessors of such material faced rigorous punishment. Later writers also alleged that 460 traditional scholars were put to death to prevent their views becoming known, but the historical accuracy of these allegations cannot be proved. Nevertheless, even on such a relatively unmelodramatic interpretation of the burning of the books, it is interesting to note that Qin Shi Huang Di, while not wishing to follow the traditional philosophy, was still sensitive about such allegations in the mouth of the populace, and indeed paid at least lip-service to the tradition in the Imperial Progresses.
Eventually, of course, Qin Shi Huang Di died, an event which took place during one of the Imperial Progresses. Li Si being chancellor, it is not altogether surprising, bearing in mind his track record, that the succession was not straightforward. Li and Zhao Gao, who was an official (possibly a eunuch, according to later writers, but this cannot be reliably confirmed), set their plan in motion. To give themselves time to get organised, they suppressed the news of the emperor’s death, and placed a cart of dried fish next to his carriage in the procession so that the presence of the emperor’s corpse would not be revealed as the body decayed. Zhao Gao seems to have been the instigator, and he moved to persuade the emperor’s younger son, Ying Huhai, to accept the throne instead of Ying Fusu, the elder son, who was persuaded to commit suicide. Zhao Gao then saw to it that Meng Tian, the military official responsible for the establishment of Qin’s defensive wall, was murdered. The remains of Qin Shi Huang Di were interred with due ceremony in his mausoleum, and Ying Huhai became the Second August Emperor, Er Shi Huang Di. A weak ruler, Er Shi Huang Di was effectively a tool of Zhao Gao, who seems to have attempted to control the Empire by increasingly severe punishments. Eventually this was counter-productive.
In 209 BCE a troop of soldiers detailed to report for duty on the defensive wall became so bogged down by torrential rains that they couldn’t get there by the day specified in their orders, and they knew that if they were late reaching the wall they would be punished by execution. One of them, a man named Chen She, decided that they might as well raise a rebellion. The worst thing that could happen to them if the rebellion failed was death, he pointed out, but the rebellion, which might possibly succeed, was a better option than the certain death that awaited them if they simply continued to the wall. So they overpowered and killed the officers escorting them, and began the first recorded revolt against the Qin Empire. It did indeed fail, but in the days that followed, the collapse of the Empire under Zhao Gao and his puppet rulers accelerated to such a degree that eventually, in 206 BCE, a man named Liu Bang, one of two contending outsiders, managed to conquer the Qin regime and supplant it with his own. He called it the Han Empire, using the name of one of the Warring States, with its appeal to the earlier Chinese traditions. So ended the fifteen-year Legalist experiment.
The Han Emperor, who had been known as Liu Bang but now took the official title of Gao Zu, set out to establish a new regime, which would be structured according to the precepts of Confucianism. Legalism had proved itself wanting as a civilised basis for government, and was to be consigned to history. Or was it?
There is no doubt that whatever its shortcomings in terms of oppressive controls and ‘cruel and unusual’ punishments, the Legalist underpinning of the administrative system of Qin had been a remarkably effective administrative machine. Regulations, however unpalatable, were clearly set out (as Xün Kuang himself would have required), and the duties and responsibilities of the bureaucracy were well defined. Defence of the state against external aggressors had been well secured, and trade and currency were regulated and sound. A network of roads and a system of mounted couriers had been established under the Qin to enable official edicts to be transmitted efficiently to all corners of the Empire, and the written script had been consolidated to ensure that all who received the edicts would be able to gain a clear understanding of their contents. Military technology was available to the incoming Han regime and so, as soon as Liu Bang’s armies had successfully absorbed the remnants of the Qin troops, defence would be secured.
And yet, the backlash against the consequences of Legalist philosophy when used as an ideology for government by fallible human beings was profound. The imperial reign of Qin had been so short-lived that despite the burning of the books, the traditional ways attributed to Confucius and the Sage Kings were still well established in the minds of both rulers and people, and a programme was embarked upon to replace the Legalist basis of the state by a Confucian ethos in which the old qualities of human-heartedness, right behaviour and virtue, bound together in an all-embracing Dao, would reform the state for the good of ruler and people alike. Efforts were made to restore the Confucian Classics destroyed under the Qin Empire so that the state would be provided once more with its revered, if not sacred, texts, on which its renewed Confucianism would be built.
Education in the restored Confucian canon was seen as central to the evolution of an ethical bureaucracy, and the Han set out a scheme of things in which all would-be officials had to sit examinations based on the Confucian Classics. This central aspect of the Han bureaucracy was to continue, with limited interruptions, down to the twentieth century CE. The Rites once again became a vital part of Imperial and bureaucratic life and procedure. All would be well again. But …
You may have noticed in the preceding paragraph that the selection of officials, although Confucian in its basis, nevertheless depended on merit and not heredity. Families anxious for their sons to become officials had to ensure that they secured this through success in the Imperial examinations, and although corruption may have allowed some nepotism to succeed, the theory was of promotion by achievement in examinations – a remarkably Legalist principle! Similarly, the general techniques of administration that the Legalist-inspired Qin had applied were found by the Han to be remarkably effective and continued to be used, although the grosser inhumanities of the Qin were mitigated. From this point onward in Chinese history, there would continue to be a tension between the official Confucianism of the state and the influence of the civil service, which inevitably embodied systematic methods that were not unrelated to the Regulations and Statecraft of Legalism.
The influence of Confucian theory is clear from the continuation of the Office of History. Si-ma Qian, whose works have already been quoted in the present volume, was the head of the Office of History in the Han Empire and, with his son, compiled the Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian, which was published in around 90 BCE. This was a massive undertaking, having as its aim the compilation of a written history spanning from the earliest legends of the Sage Kings, down to the founding of the Han Empire. It included histories and biographies drawn from extant documents as well as oral tradition, technical treatises on specialist topics such as hydraulic engineering, and many tabular presentations of information. Modern archaeologists have found that much of Si-ma Qian’s writing is remarkably accurate, even where he probably had no actual source documents to work from. Si-ma Qian’s office was also charged with maintaining an archive of all aspects of the Han Empire and, as we have seen earlier, this was consciously preserved to enable the Office of History in the next imperial regime to write the definitive history of the Han after the Mandate of Heaven had passed from the one to the other. This task was carried out faithfully across the millennia, and we have today a huge historical resource in the series of so-called Dynastic Histories that this thoroughly Confucian practice produced.
The continuity of the restored Confucianism, drawing its inspiration from the pre-Qin traditions of human-heartedness and right conduct, and administered by a loyal civil service, selected by merit, looked set to continue as the natural government style of China. The Chinese of Han, although they were aware of the continuing need to defend their territory from the northern barbarian tribes, were nevertheless very China-centric, and viewed their own civilisation as massively superior to all others, and it would have seemed to them impossible that any external influence could modify the conclusions that they had reached with the support of Confucianism.
